Communists existed everywhere and everyone took a stand on issues
By Carl Heintze
The other day it came to me as something of a shock to realize that there's a whole generation of Americans now of age who did not live through any part of the Cold War.
It's a little difficult to say specifically when the Cold War ended, but I suppose you could say it was when Ronald Reagan was president.
So there are thousands, probably millions of Americans who have no--I was going to say appreciation, but that's not quite the right word--who have no sense of the tension under which the world existed then. For them "The Bomb" is a thing of the past and the sense of doom, the nightmare of nuclear mutual destruction and the long and usually bitter contest between East and West is an unknown.
They have no personal knowledge of when the world seemed divided into two opposites.
Moreover, they don't remember what it was like when most thinking folks were asked to choose. You were either for communism or against it, and even if you were an American, there was no certainty that you would be on the American side. Communists existed everywhere, it sometimes seemed-even under every bed.
The history of the twentieth century is, among other things, the history of this contest between what Ronald Reagan called "an evil empire" and the rest of the world.
What makes it all the more fascinating is that secrecy was a part of the effort to defeat the enemy. Communism tended to emphasize secrecy.
Communist spies were the fashion, as were the various anti-communists in the West who tried to uncover them-such folks as Sen. Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and James Angleton. McCarthy didn't find many, although he claimed he did. J. Edgar did a little better, but seemed to think that everyone who didn't agree with him was suspect, and Angleton spent a large part of his working life looking for a "mole" in the CIA.
Unfortunately for us, he missed the best one the Russians had, but that's another story.
In public we also were treated to the high drama of Whittiker Chambers, a self-confessed former communist, and his relationship with Alger Hiss, a former State Department employee.
We'll probably never know the absolute truth about their relationship--though it is now generally agreed that Hiss probably was culpable and Chambers was, to say the least, odd--but it certainly was the drama of its decade..
But then, to look back on the Cold War is to discover a whole literature of former communists who joined and then left the Communist Party. This pantheon includes such figures as Arthur Koestler, Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley.
For them and for many other ex-communists, joining the party was something like becoming a secular priest or a nun. It required being issued a party card, agreeing to be bound by communist discipline, and being a part of a party cell.
Oddly enough, Muslim fundamentalists have adopted the cell system, although they get their theology from somewhere other than Marx and Lenin.
Communist cells theoretically debated in a democratic way what they were going to do about any issue, and when a consensus was reached, they were bound by that decision. Dissent was only possible before the decision, not afterward. Actually, dissent was pretty much impossible. It was not a system for free thinkers.
Being a communist thus meant "belonging." It also greatly simplified the world. Once you agreed black was black and white was white, there were no grays.
The enemy--almost all Western countries so far as Russians were concerned--never changed. Nor, for that matter, did it change for the West either. Communism became the enemy and the Russians were communists, so they were all the enemy, too.
There were, alas, even for committed communists, sudden zigs and zags between the two opposites-unpredictable changes in party discipline that one simply was required to accept, as, for example, when Stalin decided to make a pact with Hitler for reasons he best understood.
A true communist did not ask why.
Now, of course, all this seems like-and, probably is-ancient history. Not even the most diehard of Russians now touts communism as a wave of the future, and in the West, the emerging enemy seems to be what-for lack of a better term-we call "Muslim fundamentalists."
But we can hope that the world might not again be so sharply divided in halves and that its population won't be lumped into two so bitterly opposing camps.
Those who don't learn the lessons of history, however, are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Campbell Reporter. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.
Campbell, California
